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Saturday, March 01, 2014

Chomsky On A Crumbling University System

AlterNet: Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed - Faculty are increasingly hired on the Wal-Mart model as temps.
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4 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

I'm sorry I have little sympathy for the US Higher education establishment. They should be ashamed at putting an entire generation in debt to feed their huge egos. Screw em. Million dollar football coaches, endless building sprees huge salaries for the administrations. Oh yea and then there's the students whose families are paying for this Bullshit. If the system wasn't just another bunch of greedy bastards I might feel sorry for it, but its just part of the bigger rip off passing for what's left of our sorry ass economy.

4:31 PM
Jim Sande said...

Exactly and this model for education is the problem. Like so many other ventures including the arts, music, and culture everything is now run on a corporate model, universities as well. The greed always starts with the people on the top who run the show to rake in the profits and make the venture a source of growth capitalism aka vulture capitalism. Romney was essentially the chosen one to come in and spread the vulture capitalist model to as much of the public and private economy as he possibly could in an 8 year period. He even said as much with his percentage remark which run parallel to what Chomsky labels the "precariat" - those of us in a precarious financial situation who are happy to remain politically docile out of the very favor that we have been granted a crappy under-payed job. The universities now use this same model where education is not the goal, the goal is maximizing brand name profit. So they grant temporary jobs to highly educated individuals and rarely tenure a few. The problem is that long sustained scholarship and study gets whittled down to a fewer and fewer select group. This is the erosion that is occurring.

6:14 PM
Glynn Kalara said...

What they don't want is a secure stable Intelligentsia. They want the intellectual class on a short leash. The best way to have this situation, is as you say keeping them all in temp. positions without benefits or tenure. To keep them moving from one temp. position after another.

8:36 PM
Jim Sande said...

Take away the intelligentsia and now the head of the enemy is at least partly if not completely decapitated. Especially given that it's not in the least bit possible for there to be anything even remotely like a mass movement that gains steady traction. Just look and see how they easily disbanded Occupy. See how the Tea Party is now also completely co-opted by the Koch Brothers and such. Without intelligentsia there's no global warming, out of sight out of mind. Global warming becomes an "extra hot winter or summer", or see there's no global warming because it's been zero degrees through February and March so it's cold.

10:43 PM

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